An outspoken Irish priest has called for a radical rethink on relationships saying it is time the rigid connection between sexual activity and marriage is severed. Fr Tony Flannery, believes the Roman Catholic Church should change its attitude on sex before marriage, artificial contraception and the rules regarding re-marriage.
"With the advent of various ways of preventing conception, sex is no longer necessarily connected with pregnancy. For the past half century or more, the Church has lamented this, and fought against the use of any form of artificial contraception with all its might -- freely available contraception is part of the new reality within which our Church teaching has got to make some sense," he writes in a new book, Responding to the Ryan Report.
He argues: "Church teaching has officially conceded now that sex has a purpose other than procreation, namely to nourish and develop a relationship of love between two people." He advocates, that the Church "break the rigid connection between sexual activity and marriage, allowing for appropriate sexual relationships between people who are not married, when the quality of the relationship merits it".
The book reflects on this most recent indictment of the Church and the deeply-rooted problems that have brought about decades of cover-up and scandal.
Among the immediate changes being advised, Fr Flannery hopes that the "Church leadership learns to trust the believing community, and develops its teachings in partnership with them, rather then handing it down in an authoritarian manner".
In relation to the Church's thinking regarding re-marriage, Fr Flannery says, "The failure of the Church to respond to the many people who are getting married for the second time is scandalous. More often than not they are good, sincere people, and all we offer them is a blank refusal of any religious ceremony, even a blessing, coupled with a mostly unstated, but implied belief that they are living in sin and no longer pleasing God . . . such persons deserve to have their union sacramentalised in the Church, if they so wish, and must never be excluded from the Eucharist.''
Fr Flannery who has in the past expressed dissatisfaction at certain senior Catholic bishops' responses to the Ryan report, concludes, "I know that all this amounts to radical change. People will say that the Church does not change. Historically, this is not true. It has changed, and in many ways even more radically than I am suggesting -- out of evil, good can come. There is a possibility now that the ancient structures and thought processes of the Church might be shaken up, and that new thought, energy and life be breathed into them.''
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